1. Field of the Invention
Various embodiments described herein relate to search engine technologies and more specifically to human-assisted search engines. A method and system of providing tools for human searchers is described.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a system where human guides are used to process queries from users, human judgment may greatly increase the ability to respond to natural language and arbitrary questions from users. This flexibility has allowed services such as ChaCha® and Any Question Answered (AQA) to find general acceptance. However, such systems are generally presented with the difficulty of being broadly accepted when a user must pay to use the service. For example, after more than five years of operation, AQA had answered approximately twenty-two million questions. Conversely, the advertising supported ChaCha® service answers over thirty million questions per month.
However, being an advertising supported service requires a highly efficient infrastructure in order to respond to queries at a cost consistent with the advertising revenue which can be obtained. For this reason, a multi-tiered approach to responding to a request may be implemented. Initially a query may be parsed and processed automatically in order to determine whether the query is a match to an existing query and response which is available, or if the query may be answered automatically using an automated resource. However, such automated matching may have limitations. In many instances, a human may be able to rapidly recognize the meaning of a request in context, while machine matching may have a low confidence factor or may be entirely incorrect. For this reason, it is effective to use human judgment in processing queries which are not recognized by an automated system. However, this approach generally increases cost.
In order to solve this and other existing problems, it may be that an intermediary may be provided where a query may be received and interpreted, in order to improve efficiency of a subsequent search by clarifying intent of a request or query and directing the query appropriately.
The tools available to an intermediary are critical to rapid and effective processing of a query. If a toolset is complex, the intermediary may spend more time than required, which may cause frustration and dissatisfaction.
For these and other reasons, a set of tools for improving performance of processing of a search request would be greatly appreciated.